At 10 on a Tuesday morning, things are a bit complicated at
the Washington, D.C., apartment of P. J. O'Rourke, A&S '70
(MA). The humorist's wife and kids are in the kitchen. So
is the apartment's only working telephone. A reporter is on
the line, and O'Rourke suggests calling back. But ... hold
on a second ... "Tina? What's my cell phone number?"

Tina — Mrs. O'Rourke — supplies the number, and
her husband takes the callback in a quiet corner better
suited for a chat. He's in town (he lives mainly in New
Hampshire) because Atlantic Monthly Press has just
collected his recent magazine pieces in a book titled
Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism. Later in
the day, he will greet some of his reading public at a
bookstore in Arlington, Virginia. This may not be the best
time to be in Greater Washington promoting a new book of
conservative political commentary, for this is the day Bill
Clinton's My Life hits the shelves with a 900-page
thud. But O'Rourke, cognizant of demographics, isn't
worried. "I know that audience in suburban D.C.," he says
of the patrons he'll meet that evening. "That bookstore's a
stronghold of military people and CIA people and various
government this-and-that's who are not of a particularly
Clintonian point-of-view."

When Patrick Jake O'Rourke left Ohio and came due east for
graduate study at Hopkins, he intended to write novels that
would make their own 900-page thuds. But not long after
graduating, he discovered that making people laugh was more
fun, and surely more lucrative. Now the author of 11 books
of journalism and political commentary, O'Rourke is the
unofficial Smartass Laureate of the United States, aptly
described by the Chicago Tribune as "a trophy hunter
let loose in an unguarded zoo."

The trophy hunter, a Republican of the skeptical,
libertarian persuasion, describes himself as to the right
of Attila — after all, he notes, the Hun was "an
overpowerful executive pushing a policy of economic
redistribution in an atmosphere of permissive social mores"
— but that doesn't spare the American right wing from
his barbs. He's a journalist, but that doesn't afford
reporters a free pass, either. Nor does he let himself off
the hook. In Parliament of Whores, his examination
of the U.S. government circa 1991, he wrote that the main
problem with the government's war on drugs was that
Americans refused to be serious about drug addiction, or
about anything else. Then he conceded, "The only time I've
ever been serious about drugs was back in college, when I
seriously took a whole bunch of them. And I still take
drugs now and then. Like most Americans, I'm perfectly
willing to tell the government where to go and then stand
out in the road to keep it from getting there." In Peace
Kills, he reports that when he was in Kuwait last year
to cover the first weeks of the Iraq war, he learned that
the Anglo-American invasion had begun when the phone woke
him up. On the line was Tina, calling from the States to
tell him what she'd just seen on the news. "That was
embarrassing for a professional journalist in a combat
zone," he wrote.

If O'Rourke supports an -ism, it's leave-us-alone-ism,
leavened by ironic self-assessment: Deep down, most people,
himself included, are amiable goofs more serious about the
prospects of buying a flat-screen television than about
politics.

As a social critic and political thinker, O'Rourke does not
propound much in the way of new big ideas. If he supports
an –ism, it's leave-us-alone-ism, leavened by ironic
self-assessment: Deep down, most people, himself included,
are amiable goofs more serious about the prospects of
buying a flat-screen television than about politics. As for
politics, we're best off when government leaves us alone,
but we mostly get the government we deserve because we're
amiable goofs. As a reporter, his métier is to pierce
pretension and hypocrisy by recording the little
absurdities and contradictions of everyday human behavior,
whether that behavior is in the chambers of Congress, in a
war zone, or on the sofa. As a writer, he's the master of
the ironic anecdote and the snarky quick hit. This is true
as well in conversation.

For example, ask him about one of his favorite targets,
Bill Clinton, and he says, "I interviewed him when he was
running for president in 1992 and I didn't care for him at
all. My family was in the car sales business, and I just
know the type too well. I always thought if he hadn't been
doing what he was doing, he'd be selling lots in Whitewater
that were under water. A smart guy, but a mind like a
hamster wheel, you know? It didn't connect with anything."

Or ask him about "the Arab Street," that Islamic
Everyman-in-a-kaffiyeh who is supposed to be a major
concern of U.S. foreign policy, and he replies, "I'll give
you an anecdote. When I was in Beirut, 1984, I got stopped
at a checkpoint by this kid, very much a progenitor of
what's running around the Middle East today. He belonged to
Hezbollah, which was the radical Shiite militia. He's
holding me at gunpoint and screaming and yelling at me,
doing a 20-minute rant about America Great Satan Devil and
how we created Zionism and all the problems in the world,
all that 'Arab Street' stuff that you hear today. At the
end of which he says to me, 'And as soon as I get my green
card I'm going to Dearborn, Michigan, to go to dental
school.' I'm sure now the kid's all grown up and a
prosperous orthodontist in Dearborn with a house and a
lawn. America is hated the world over, except millions and
millions of people are lined up at embassies trying to get
visas, or sealing themselves in shipping containers and
undergoing all sorts of hell in order to become
Americans."

When O'Rourke arrived at Hopkins in 1969, it was for the Writing Seminars, then still part of
the English department. Elliot
Coleman tried to teach him poetry, Mich'l Lynch prose. "I
graduated with a highly theoretical, not to say
semi-imaginary, MA in English," O'Rourke recalls. "It was
an interesting life lesson. I mean, I was 21 going on 22
and all of a sudden I was given a year off to do anything I
wanted and a stipend that was adequate. I didn't have to
work, and I was way too young for that to have been a good
thing. It wasn't as bad as having all the money or women or
drugs I could have wanted at that age, but in terms of its
effect on my writing it was probably in that same
department." He recalls jaunts to Baltimore's Fell's Point
neighborhood, to a place called Pete's Hotel that served
15-cent draft beers and 37-cent shots. "I would go down to
Pete's, get blind drunk, then ride my motorcycle back up to
29th Street where I lived."

When not blind drunk and risking his neck on a motorbike,
he tried to work on The Big Novel. "I had made a conscious
decision to be a writer, without any evident talent, and I
beavered away. The kind of writing I wanted to do was the
kind that was then academically respected. You know —
big, sweeping, dense, incomprehensible stuff. I wanted to
be James Joyce. I wanted to write something that would make
Finnegan's Wake look brief and transparent. But I just
didn't have the talent to do this, thank God."

O'Rourke resists handicapping the November presidential
election. "We're going to have to see what went on in Iraq
that morning, that Tuesday morning, and what's going on in
the economy. You cannot convince people that the president
does not somehow control the economy. It's
startling."

After graduating from Hopkins, he needed what every writer
of dense, incomprehensible stuff needs: a job. Friends in
Baltimore ran an underground newspaper called Harry
and invited him to join the staff. That's where he realized
he had a knack for humor. It's also where he first laid
eyes on an issue of the satirical magazine National
Lampoon. "It was a revelation," he remembers. "I
thought, That looks like a lot of fun to do." He pitched a
story to its editors, which they liked. One thing led to
another, and soon he had a staff job there. Over the next
30 years, he worked his way up to tonier editorial
neighborhoods, from Lampoon to Rolling Stone,
where he was the token Republican (his term), to the
venerable pages of The Atlantic, where he's now a
correspondent.

Much of his best work has come from his forays abroad,
usually to places where people either are expressing their
level of satisfaction with government by throwing rocks and
bottles at the cops, or taking cover from explosions and
automatic-rifle fire. Over the years he has reported from
40 countries, including Haiti, Lebanon, the Philippines,
South Korea, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Gaza,
Kuwait, and Iraq. But he says he has assured his wife that
the latest Persian Gulf conflict was his final stint as a
war correspondent.

"Iraq was my last gasp," he says. "I didn't go to
Afghanistan and I wouldn't have gone to Iraq if I hadn't
thought it was the most important story I'll ever cover. My
wife and I had two kids then and we had a long talk about
this, and I said I'm not going just because it's fun or I
miss the adventure or the camaraderie or any of that crap.
I really think this story is going to shape history, for
maybe a very long time. She agreed, she understood."

O'Rourke, who turns 57 this autumn, has just had a third
child. "You know, you'd have thought I'd have learned
something about birth control," he says. "All I can say is
I met my wife late." Peace Kills bears a dedication
to another father of young children, The Atlantic's
former editor-at-large, Michael Kelly, who was killed early
in the war: He could have advocated the war in Iraq
without going to cover it. He could have covered it without
putting himself in harm's way. But liberty is an expensive
feast. And Mike was a man who always picked up the
check.

"He was a good friend," O'Rourke says. "He was an
absolutely terrific reporter, just the best: smart,
observant, one of those guys who noticed the important
stuff and passed over the unimportant stuff. He also did
something I have a lot of respect for, which is, he didn't
spend a lot of time interviewing allegedly important and
influential people. That's good because important and
influential people didn't get to be important and
influential by being dumb enough to tell reporters the
truth. It's a piece of arrogance in reporters, most common
in television, to think you're going to sit down with
Vladimir Putin and have him lean over and say, 'Just
between you and me, Barbara, we're going to nuke Chechnya
tomorrow.'"

So after a few public appearances to promote the new book
("Writers are in this awful position. I mean, the guy who
makes cars doesn't then have to put on an ugly sport coat
and sell them. But writers do.") he plans to repair to
their farmhouse in New Hampshire and figure out what to
write next. He resists handicapping the November
presidential election. "We're going to have to see what
went on in Iraq that morning, that Tuesday morning, and
what's going on in the economy," he says. "It's startling.
You cannot convince people that the president does not
somehow control the economy. They have this
principal-of-the-school, CEO-of-the-corporation,
father-of-the-family idea of the president, that he can
decide what we get to wear in the halls, bolster corporate
profits, and decide where we go on vacation. None of that
is true."

At the moment, he doesn't seem roused by politics. He has a
little fun when asked about Democrat John Kerry's selection
of John Edwards as a running mate: "I don't think it's a
big improvement. Edwards is basically the guy on the back
cover of every telephone book who says, 'If you've ever
been injured in an accident, call me.'" But looking at the
bigger picture, he says, "It is a kind of dictatorship of
boredom. This is best seen not so much in political
campaigning but in policy, the huge bills that go through
Congress, and all the strange stuff in those bills that no
one can summon the patience to discover in the first place,
or publicize. And nobody on Earth can summon the skill to
make the public care. That would be genius."